Connecticut stage news and reviews from Christopher Arnott

By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen

Some see Midsummer Night’s Dream as a light comedy. Other imagine it a dark play in a shadowy forest.

Others see it as a black perfumey candle for the off-season.

At Yankee Candle’s flagship megashop in South Deerfield, Mass. (a stone’s throw from the Ashfield farm of the Double Edge Theatre company, in case you needed an added theater reference), there’s a small gloomy-doomy area in honor of Hallowe’en, with gargoyles and spooks and what I assume is simply the blackest-looking candle the display-builders could find at the time. (Elsewhere in the vast store, the main holiday being pushed is Christmas.)

Whatever the inspiration, I think the “Midsummer’s Night” Yankee Candle has more to do with Shakespeare (or—given that the display features the Seven Deadly Sins—the bard’s pal Christopher Marlowe) than with Hallowe’en any day.